In the waning hours of the old year, Margaret Thatcher hammered another nail into coffin of Empire by signing treaty transferring Hong Kong to China in 1997. . . . The UN General Assembly, having studied the devastation in Ethiopia, voted, 122 to 5 (U.S., G.B., Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg), to spend $73.5 million on building a conference center in Addis Ababa. That money, said U.S. representative Richard Nygard, could pay for inoculation of one million children, build 25,000 wells and pumps for 12.5 million people, and feed 150,000 Ethiopian families for a year. . . . On Dec. 18, Egyptian Foreign Minister Esmat Abdel Meguid took his seat at meeting of Islamic Conference Organization in Yemen for first time in five years, over objections of Libya, Syria, Iran. The Algerian representative commented that if Damascus and Tripoli didn’t like it, they could take a walk. Quite a switch from the days when Algeria’s Boumedienne led the radical Arab world. . . . French Minister for Cooperation and Development Christian Nucci signed an aid agreement with the Sandinistas making Nicaragua the third largest recipient of French foreign aid in Latin America (after Brazil and Mexico). . . . Elections in Grenada and Belize (former British Honduras) brought pro-U.S. regimes to power. In Belize, Prime Minister-designate Manuel Esquivel, whose conservative United Democratic Party won 21 of 28 seats in the parliament, pledged to open up his country to foreign investment and called for closer economic ties with the United States. . . . Going the rounds in El Salvador: In contest to determine which was the most honest government in Latin America, Mexico won. It bought the judges. … It was Merry Christmas Soviet-style for ten men demonstrating in front of the Pushkin statue in central Moscow in honor of International Human Rights Day. They were arrested. The demonstration consisted of standing silently in front of the statue—and removing their hats. . . . And U.S. News reports Svetlana Alliluyeva is already unhappy in Moscow, and that her gutsy 13- year-old daughter, Olga, turned up for her first day in a Moscow school wearing a crucifix around her neck.
At home it’s Crèches 10, ACLU 0 around the land. New York’s Central Park has erected its first crèche in sixty years, as a result of the Supreme Court decision in Pawtucket, R.I., case. . . Outgoing Education Secretary Terrel Bell’s rating of high schools in the fifty states found New Hampshire’s low-funded but high-quality schools again placing first in nation on SAT scores. . . . Harvard professor Christoph Wolff has discovered 35 unknown compositions for the organ by Johann Sebastian Bach in the Yale library, just in time for Bach’s three-hundredth birthday party in 1985. . . . To the surprise of no one who watches the evening news, Michael Robinson’s Media Analysis Project at George Washington U. found TV evening news coverage of the campaign three times more critical of Ronald Reagan than of Walter Mondale. . . . Final campaign quip by former Jerry Ford gag writer Robert Orben: “1984 was the year they said Ronald Reagan could beat Walter Mondale with his eyes closed—and did.”
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